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From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a mélange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flâneur, an incognito stroller. Through day and night, in gleaming cafés and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.
Baudelaire's Prose Poems is the first full-length, integral study of the fifty prose poems Baudelaire wrote between 1857 and his death in 1867, collected posthumously under the title Le Spleen de Paris. Edward Kaplan resurrects this neglected masterpiece by defining the structure and meaning of the entire collection, which Kaplan himself has translated as The Parisian Prowler. Engaging in a dialogue with deconstructionists whose critical methods often obscure the meaning of the whole, Kaplan rejects the view of prose poems as a random assemblage of melodic rhapsodies. Instead, he sees a coherent ensemble of "fables of modern life" that join lyricism and critical self-awareness. Kaplan defines three dimensions of experience that inform The Parisian Prowler from beginning to end: the esthetic includes art, ideal beauty, and especially the intense immediacy of sensations, fantasy, and dream; the ethical includes principles of right and wrong, relations between intimates or between individuals and the community; and the religious--not to be confused with church or dogma--points to the province of ultimate reality, whether it be God or an absolute standard of truth, justice, and meaning. These dimensions are explored by a narrator, a complex, highly self-conscious writer whose passion for pure Beauty continually frustrates his yearning for affection. He begins his tour through 1850s Paris alienated from reality, becomes aggravated by conflicts between his "ethical" and "esthetic" drives--to the point of despair--and ends by expressing loyal friendship. Analyzing the fables in relation to one another in pairs or groups, Kaplan demonstrates how later pieces intermingle or even confuse the narrator's esthetic and ethical drives, and how the most advanced "theoretical fables"--through ironic puns on their form--further undermine this simplistic dualism. Baudelaire's fables of modern life radically challenge us to examine our presuppositions, Kaplan argues. Though rarely didactic, the narrator's Socratic irony engages readers in a volatile dialogue, provoking them to form their own judgments. He often betrays self-destructive anger, rebelling against injustice or stupidity--or against women who might love him. At times he insults our complacency and self-deception with vicious glee; at other times, he recognizes his own frailty, nurturing a sense of fellowship with the oppressed. Seeking both to analyze experience objectively and to sympathize with isolated individuals like himself, Baudelaire's narrator joins criticism and poetry in a voyage of self-discovery, finally accepting experience as impure and mixed. Kaplan contends that the "prose poems" constitute a genre parallel to the poems Baudelaire added to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, both of which illustrate fundamental principles of the theory of modernity he developed in his essays on art. The self-reflective fables in The Parisian ProwlerM/i>--depicting a way of thinking beyond ideologies--clarify Baudelaire's development as poet, critic, and thinker.
Roaming Paris streets by night in the early 1930s, Brassa created arresting images of the city's dramatic nocturnal landscape. First published in French in 1932, this new edition brings one of Brassa's finest works back into print. The back alleys, metro stations, and bistros he photographed are at turns hauntingly empty or peopled by prostitutes, laborers, thugs, and lovers. "Paris by Night" is a stunning portrait of nighttime in the City of Light, as captured by its most articulate observer. 62 photos.
Resonant Gaps examines the ways in which Charles Baudelaire exploited certain powers of figurative language while writing on music, particularly that of Richard Wagner. Unlike many recent music/literature studies, Margaret Miner focuses less on the possible convergences of text and music than on their productive distances and divergences. At the heart of this study is Baudelaire's 1861 essay Richard Wagner et Tannhauser à Paris, which is included in this volume in the French text of the 1861 Dentu edition. Called a "long-meditated work of circumstance" by its author, Richard Wagner is the only piece of music criticism that Baudelaire ever attempted, despite the prominence of music as a theme and a metaphor throughout his writings. In the essay, says Miner, Baudelaire strove to erase the distinction between reading about Wagner's music and listening to it. Continually sidestepping expectations and evading classification, Baudelaire makes connections among musical understanding, concrete or spatial distance, and the abstract or conceptual distance between different arts. Miner discusses such topics related to Baudelaire's project as his repertoire of textual and rhetorical maneuvers, including italicization, quotation, personification, digression, and metaphor; his assessment of the music's seductive ability to surround and suffuse the listener; and the misunderstandings about and prejudices against Wagner and his music that hampered its critical reception in France. Throughout her study, Miner also refers to similar literary undertakings by Liszt, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Proust, which involved the music of Wagner and Debussy. Miner argues that Baudelaire's aim in attempting to lessen or suppress various distances that he discovers between his text and the music is not to freeze movement entirely but to inscribe his writing on Wagner's music so that the two might travel together over an aesthetic landscape that shelters rather than separates them.
A comparison of the mid-19th-century city in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire and their responses to the inescapable push of modernization
Charles Baudelaire's place among the great poets of the Western world is undisputed, and his influence on the development of poetry since his lifetime has been enormous. In this Companion, essays by outstanding scholars illuminate Baudelaire's writing both for the lay reader and for specialists. In addition to a survey of his life and a study of his social context, the volume includes essays on his verse and prose, analyzing the extraordinary power and effectiveness of his language and style, his exploration of intoxicants like wine and opium, and his art and literary criticism. The volume also discusses the difficulties, successes and failures of translating his poetry and his continuing power to move his readers. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, this Companion provides students and scholars of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century French and European literature with a comprehensive and stimulating overview of this extraordinary poet.
In his poetry and critical writings, Baudelaire performs a vast fusion of experiential and literary sources, explores in a more resolute manner the domain of correspondences, and, thereby, marks a radical departure from the accepted norms. He challenges, humbles, and then reaffirms and recenters Western tradition. That is his finest achievement.
In Representing Empire Ying Xiong examines Japanese-language colonial literature written by Japanese expatriate writers in Taiwan and Manchuria. Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese sources, Representing Empire reveals not only a nuanced picture of Japanese literary terrain but also the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism in the colonies. While the existing literature on Japanese nationalism has largely remained within the confines of national history, by using colonial literature as an example, Ying Xiong demonstrates that transnational forces shaped Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century. With its multidisciplinary and comparative approach, Representing Empire adds to a growing body of literature that challenges traditional interpretations of Japanese nationalism and national literary canon. “Representing Empire is an outstanding accomplishment, at once making clearer and complicating our understandings of the literary worlds of Manchuria and Taiwan, and the greater imperial empire within which all were transformed. ... add[s] substantially to the ways in which Japan’s empire and twentieth century East Asian history more generally might be interpreted.” Norman Smith, University of Guelph, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center Publication (February, 2015)